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Lloyd Bentsen Dies at 85; Senator Ran With Dukakis

Lloyd Bentsen, former congressman and senator from Texas, onetime secretary of the Treasury and the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1988, died yesterday at his home in Houston. He was 85. The cause was complications of a stroke he suffered in 1998, his family said.

Rapid Rise to Influence

In a long career in public office, Lloyd Bentsen was involved in some of the most important legislative battles of the second half of the 20th century. But he is probably best remembered for one devastating riposte he delivered an hour into a deadly dull debate between the vice-presidential nominees in Omaha in October 1988.

Almost as an aside, his youthful Republican opponent, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, remarked, "I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency."

Mr. Bentsen pounced. "Senator," he declared, contempt in his voice and admonition in his eyes, "I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

In the election a month later, Mr. Bentsen and Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee, were trounced by George Bush and Mr. Quayle. But that one moment onstage in a generally lackluster election campaign propelled Mr. Bentsen's national image from that of an unexceptional Texas senator beholden to the oil and gas industry to that of a major national figure.

In their book "The Quest for the Presidency 1988," Peter Goldman and Tom Mathews wrote that before the debate, Mr. Bentsen "had been the forgotten man" of the campaign.

Afterward, Mr. Bentsen's "own gray solidity," they wrote, was "made luminescent by the pallor of the other three men."

Then and throughout his career, Mr. Bentsen was helped by the fact that he looked and comported himself like Hollywood's version of a successful politician. He was tall and thin with handsome features, a deep, soothing voice, elegant clothes and such legendary self-control that those who served with him in Congress and in the Clinton cabinet could not recall a single instance in which he let his emotions get the better of him.

Indeed, in his younger days in Congress, his skills as a poker player were fearsome. Once, it is said, he won a house from another lawmaker in a late-night game. Asked about this years later, Mr. Bentsen, looking like a man with confidence in his hole card, replied, "There are some who have alleged it."

Big Lloyd and a Big Ranch

Lloyd Millard Bentsen Jr. — he stopped using his middle initial and the "Jr." long ago — was born into prosperity on Feb. 11, 1921, in Mission, Tex., in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the country's poorest regions.

His father, Lloyd Bentsen Sr., known as Big Lloyd, had taken military training in San Antonio in World War I and moved to South Texas from South Dakota after the war. He made money buying and selling land, and quickly expanded from ranching to oil and then to banking.

The Arrowhead Ranch, where Lloyd Jr. was reared, was one of the biggest in the valley and remained in the Bentsen family until it was sold in 1997 for more than $6 million.

After earning a law degree from the University of Texas, Mr. Bentsen enlisted in the Army as a private in 1942 and quickly became a commissioned officer in the Army Air Forces. Before being shipped off to Europe in 1943, he married Beryl Ann Longino, known as B. A., a fashion model who had been a college classmate.

Charming and enormously popular in Washington and Texas, Mrs. Bentsen often wanted to stay at social functions long after her husband was ready to leave. Even when they were well into middle age, he would playfully toss her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry her out of parties. In addition to his wife, his survivors, all from Houston, include two sons, Lloyd III and Lan; a daughter, Tina Smith; two brothers, Don and Kenneth; a sister, Betty Bentsen Winn; and eight grandchildren.

During the war, Mr. Bentsen, a B-24 pilot, was shot down twice and received the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other decorations. He left the Army as a colonel. Back home, helped by his war record and his family's money and prominence, he was elected Hidalgo County judge in 1946. Two years later he was elected to the House of Representatives, becoming the youngest member of Congress at age 27.

Mr. Bentsen was a protégé of a fellow Texan, Speaker Sam Rayburn, but when he was 33, after six years in the House, he decided to leave politics to earn money to support his young family.

He often told the story that when he announced he would not run for re-election, Rayburn, a bachelor, commented: "Lloyd, it's a damn fool thing you've done. Why, in another 25 years, you could be speaker."

Mr. Bentsen replied: "Mr. Speaker, I have a wife and three kids. They" — the government — "pay me $12,500 a year. I can't cut it on that. I have to go back to Texas and go to work."

And that is what he did for the next 15 years. In 1955, he went to Houston and founded the Consolidated American Life Insurance Company, called Calico. At the time, the $7 million his father put up was described as the largest initial capitalization ever for a Texas insurance company.

Calico soon branched out into other businesses, and by 1967 Mr. Bentsen was president of a family financial holding company, Lincoln Consolidated Inc. The company, one of the first in Texas to use data processing technology, owned businesses ranging from a savings and loan to a funeral home. Mr. Bentsen also served on the boards of the Lockheed Corporation and various petroleum companies.

In 1970, having earned his fortune, Mr. Bentsen re-entered politics, challenging Ralph W. Yarborough in the Democratic primary for Mr. Yarborough's Senate seat. Mr. Yarborough, a strong supporter of labor unions and an opponent of the Vietnam War, was a leading figure in the liberal-populist wing of the Texas Democratic Party. The battle was a bruising one in which Mr. Bentsen painted him as an ally of antiwar rioters, and it left wounds in the state party that did not heal for years.

Mr. Bentsen narrowly won the primary and defeated Mr. Bush, then a congressman from Houston, in the general election. The two candidates were on the same wavelength ideologically — Mr. Bush less conservative than most Republicans, and Mr. Bentsen less liberal than most Democrats — and Mr. Bentsen won largely on the strength of a heavy Democratic majority in voter registration in Texas.

A Pro-Business Democrat

After only two years in the Senate, Mr. Bentsen was given a prized seat on the Finance Committee, which handles tax, trade and social welfare legislation. He got the post in large part because the chairman, Senator Russell B. Long, Democrat of Louisiana, wanted to solidify his majority on the committee on the side of favorable treatment for the oil and gas industry.

In 1976, as his first term in the Senate was drawing to a close, Mr. Bentsen made a quixotic run for the Democratic presidential nomination. He called himself a Harry Truman Democrat and tried to establish a base as a moderate Southerner.

But the campaign never got off the ground. Squeezed by the combined opposition of Jimmy Carter and George C. Wallace, Mr. Bentsen dropped out of the race in the spring with only six delegates, all in Texas. That November, he easily won re-election to the Senate.

Photo

Lloyd Bentsen testifying to the Senate panel investigating Whitewater in November 1995.Credit
Paul Hosefros/The New York Times

As he moved up in seniority on the Finance Committee, he became increasingly influential as an ally of business interests. He devoted considerable energy to maintaining tax breaks for small oil and gas producers and for the real estate industry, to which he had close ties. He was a leader on trade expansion and pension issues. And he was one of the foremost Democratic advocates of private investment and economic growth.

Mr. Bentsen basically took a pass on the most important matter to come before the Finance Committee while he was a member, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which completely rewrote the nation's tax code. He eventually voted for the legislation, but he was never enthusiastic about its underlying principle of ending most deductions and tax incentives in return for lower tax rates. He tried, but failed, to block a section of the measure that abolished most real estate tax shelters.

In 1987, with Senator Long's retirement, Mr. Bentsen became the committee's chairman. Soon after he took the seat, he was embarrassed by the disclosure that he had invited lobbyists to breakfasts in exchange for $10,000 campaign contributions. Rather than make excuses, he admitted to a "doozy" of a mistake and refunded the $92,500 he had collected.

In 1990, Mr. Bentsen was instrumental in brokering the budget deal in which President Bush agreed to a tax increase.

On politically delicate issues outside the Finance Committee, he often voted with Republicans. He supported prayer in public schools, aid to anti-Marxist rebels in Nicaragua, production of the MX missile and restrictions on involuntary busing for school desegregation. He voted against federal financing of abortions for poor women and against gun control.

Compared with that of many other senators who stayed long enough to become chairmen of powerful committees, Mr. Bentsen's Senate career was not particularly distinguished. No landmark legislation bears his name. He was hampered in part by the fact that Republicans controlled the White House for all but 4 of his 22 years in the Senate.

But he made many friends among senators of both parties. His contacts in Congress and the national acclaim he had gained from his 1988 campaign for vice president led President Bill Clinton to choose him as Treasury secretary. The appointment was applauded in Congress and on Wall Street.

At the Treasury, Mr. Bentsen led the fight in 1993 for approval of the first Clinton budget, which included a tax increase and was approved without any Republican votes. Then he mustered enough Republican support to win passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement over significant Democratic opposition.

After two years in the cabinet, Mr. Bentsen, by then 73, resigned. He told the president that he had long planned to retire from politics in 1994, at the end of what would have been his fourth term in the Senate.

Out of office, Mr. Bentsen joined the Houston office of the law firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand, which makes a point of hiring famous former politicians as lobbyists and rainmakers. Among others, Bob Dole and George J. Mitchell, both former Senate majority leaders, also joined the firm after they left office.

In his political retirement, Mr. Bentsen traveled widely. He helped create a billion-dollar private investment firm to finance projects throughout Latin America and headed the advisory committee of the Beacon Group, a New York investment bank with interests around the world.

As a private citizen, he stayed out of the limelight and almost never spoke out about public policy. But his office in Houston remained a testament to his life in politics.

On the walls were portraits of the 10 presidents he had known, from Truman through Bill Clinton. On his portrait, Mr. Clinton had written, "To my friend Lloyd Bentsen, who makes me study things until I get it right."

And in the center was the photograph that was in a prominent spot on the wall of every office Mr. Bentsen occupied for nearly 50 years — a portrait of his beloved mentor, Sam Rayburn.

David E. Rosenbaum, the reporter for this article, died in January.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page C13 of the New York edition with the headline: Lloyd Bentsen, Senator, Treasury Chief And Author of Notable Retort, Dies at 85. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe